I wanted to do this self-portrait series for a few reasons.

I wanted to try working with video which I had never done before. I wanted to document my moving body in a more permanent form than theatre. I’ve done two live performance self-portraits (one woman autobiographical shows), but in the theatre there is always a consideration to entertain. Or at least to be compelling. You’ve taken people’s money and have asked them to sit quietly in a dark room for a period of time. With this project I wanted to explore other types of performance without those constraints.

I wanted the freedom to be emotionally detached, banal, discordant and truly obsessive in the manipulation of my visual image.

I should also mention that at the time I was putting these together (spring-fall 2009) I had become so wrapped up in my own glamour that I had to start commenting on it. Crack it open a little. Destroy a bit of it. Loosen its hold on me.

I define glamour as that which gives the effect or aura of beauty or special-ness, but is not beauty itself. For me, the elements of glamour can include make-up, clothing, fake hair, body positioning, social status, prestige, publicity, having cameras on you, being on television, having your image reproduced and mass produced, as well as having your image disseminated.

Glamour and its effects prevade our culture. Everyone is susceptable to it.

These pieces are an unapologetic self-exploration of my personal glamour. Video seemed an ideal medium to explore this for obvious reasons.

I consider these self-portraits early rudimentary experiments into queer video.

I suggest reading the artists statements below each video before viewing them.

SELF-PORTRAIT AS BEHIND-THE-SCENES FOOTAGE (GLAMOUR-CRACK 1)

When I made this I was fascinated by celebrity footage I started watching on TMZ and other blog sites- uneditted paparazzi footage of celebrities. There is little narrative to these videos. Famous people, usually at least a bit fucked up, roll in and out of parties, they drive around with cameras following them, they are on red carpets, far away at an event or a bar. Everywhere is glitter, fashion, flashbulbs and the everpresent gaze of the camera. I found the videos utterly compelling for the aura of glamour, a magic spell of importance, they gave to the actresses even while they did the most banal or indecypherable things. Every nuance of the ‘celebrity performances’ I viewed became interesting to me. I laughed when I told this to my friend, Josh, who is a music video and television director, and he called those videos “quick, cheap, disposable hits of glamour-crack.”

FYI – When I was asked to be Barbie at LG Fashion Week I was sometimes aware and sometimes not aware that my friend Michael was filming me, but nothing in this video is made up.

SELF-PORTRAIT AS EARLY MORNING TV APPEARANCE (GLAMOUR-CRACK 2)

When I was asked to do this interview I only agreed to do it if I could have equal shared rights to all of the raw video footage. I have been interviewed and featured on television programs in the past who would later edit and alter the footage “to make good TV.” This editing often portrayed me in a way I didn’t feel was accurate, but was intended to make me (at the best of times) more palatable to mass audiences, more sympathetic, more understandable, etc. Sometimes, I felt that the people handling the footage revealed their own prejudices about trans issues, beauty and plastic surgery in how they manipulated the video footage (and me.) Sometimes I felt they handled the raw footage to hide their own feelings about my trans body which were apparent to me on set.

This video is my re-edit, my representation, and a kind of emotional response and intellectual critique to these experiences. I radically re-editted the footage the station aired. I also added all of the titles.

Thank you to Amira for being such a great sport about it.

SELF-PORTRAIT AS NIGHTCLUB PROJECTION (GLAMOUR-CRACK 3)

In June, 2009, I went down to Montreal’s to host the legendary Drama Queen party at Tribe Hyperclub. (Past hosts include Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Amanda Lepore and Lena Love.) I showed up a day early to shoot a video that the promoters wanted to project on the club’s giant screen above the dance floor throughout the night and on the monitors around the various bars.

I think the early idea was to get some sexy shots, runway, footage, acting like a Pussy Cat Doll, generally giving a fierce tranny effect. Typical “club tranny” stuff.

At the time I was really obsessed with David Lynch’s Lost Highway and Inland Empire, as well as Cindy Sherman’s Centerfold series. I told them I wanted to use those works as inspiration. I also wanted to do something discordant, a video that wasn’t what it was supposed to be, something that would critique what it was supposed to be.

This is what we came up with.

The video was orginally played on a loop so the director cut it again after the party when he had more time to really make it what we wanted.

In order to show it online I put this particular dance track to the video.

I love knowing that the first installation showing of this video was above dancefloor because this video is so unusal.

SELF-PORTRAIT AS PHOTO SHOOT (GLAMOUR-CRACK 4)

David J. Romero took photos of me all through my video shoot for the Drama Queen night club projection. The idea was to create a fashion spread simultaneously. He produced so many images I liked that I wanted to turn his photography into another project so I put them on an image stream. In doing this what is created is a narrative of “fake” posed moments and “real” candid moments. Romero kept shooting whether I was ready for a close-up or exhausted under the hot lights.

I’d like to point out that the above video ’skews’ the reality of what it was to be at the shoot. Contrived and uncontrived visual moments were captured and now strung together on a timeline, but the actual shoot took about nine hours from hair and make-up to wrap. I think this ‘telescoped’ version of time heightens the glamour of the shoot so much that it becomes abhorrant.

I’ve used every single the photographer took.

To see the series of photographs David Romero selected (and manipulated) for his beautiful series cut and paste the link below:

http://ninaarsenault.com/2009/08/photo-shoot-with-david-j-romero/

me performing as Jessica Rabbit at the tranny strip club where I used to work (2007)…

…”real men” (a detective) lusting after a cartoon woman in Disney’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit…

…photos of me modelling as Jessica Rabbit for anatomy artists at the Cameron House (2007). FYI- the dress is very painful to wear because of how small the corset makes my waist, and the sequins dig into my flesh.

(the following text is an excerpt from Holy Terror, Bob Colacello, HarperCollinsPublishers, 1990)

That was the day that Andy unveiled his latest series of self-portraits. He returned to self-portraiture as regularly as Rembrandt, though I never thought he was trying to find himself. It was more like he was trying to leave an image for history of the way he wished he looked. It was another revision, another lie, though lies in their way tell other truths. These were stunning: double and triple exposure of Andy’s profile in negative, white on black, red on black, black on black. He looked like a calm, neat, beautiful ghost. It wasn’t easy working for a ghost, especially one who wanted to be calm, neat and beautiful, and wasn’t.

But there was something else in these self-portraits too, in the eyes especially, and you only saw it if you looked long enough: the fear, pain, and sadness that were always there, no matter how much Andy tried to silkscreen them out. (pg 373)

“Skin is misleading… in life, you only have your own skin… There is a mismatch in human relationships, because you never are what you have… I have the skin of an angel, but I am a jackal… the skin of a crocodile, but I am a puppy dog… the skin of a woman, but I am a man; I never have the skin of what I am. There is an exception to the rule, because I am never what I have.”

—from Eugenie Lemoine Luccioni’s “The Dress” as read before each of French artist Orlan’s seminal plastic surgery art performances

When Andy Warhol declared “I love plastic. I want to be plastic.” almost fifty years ago, he was honoring the true idol of his era. Warhol wasn’t being cheeky or ironic – he was getting spiritual. A substance of powerful polymorphic properties, at the time plastic was the perfect embodiment of malleability and transformability . A sleek and shiny entity that seemed indestructible, it was a paragon of immortality. Warhol rightfully recognized that plastic was a quintessential representation of mid-twentieth century ideals.

We now live in the age of silicone. These semi-inorganic polymeric compounds are even more mutable and closer to being eternal than plastic. Silicone has affected our daily lives in countless ways (hello lube) but perhaps its most profound impact has only begun to be felt. With this substance, we have been given the unparalelled ability to manifest our innermost desires on our external flesh. We can refashion the bodies that nature imposed on us to more closely fit our own terms. We can incarnate our own visions of perfection; become the literal personifications of our most profound fantasies; transform ourselves into avatars of our deepest interiors.

Much of the discourse around plastic surgery is based on a series of assumptions. On the one hand, defenders tell us that there is a schism in the way that we experience our identities – how we look on the outside is at odds with who we believe we authentically are inside – and these surgical interventions are justified because they satisfy some apparent ly profound need for coherence in our identities. On the other hand, detractors argue that we live in a world where one’s self-image is distorted through endless media refractions and these surgeries are turning us into reproductions of mediated versions of reality that have nothing to do with the real.

Coherence. Real. Words that come out of a model of identity that is constant and stable.

Like Warhol, Nina Arsenault (herself, in some ways, a Warholian creation) understands silicone. She has used this substance to raise the pursuit of the real fake to metaphysical levels. In doing so, she destabilizes the coherence and authenticity of identity. Like silicone itself, Nina creates a new paradigm of mutable identity: one that will not stick, that is likely to change, inconstant, variable. And magnificent. Tonight, she is a silicone goddess and you are in her white temple. In her presence, you can no longer tell where the artificial ends and the real begins; what is sacred and what is profane; what is constant and what is changing. And you embark on a journey where the imaginary merges with the physical to create the idealized landscape that is art.

Enjoy the show!

Brendan Healy
Artistic Director, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre

(published with the permission of the author)